Back in the day when I was bouncing around drinking and hitting bars every other night I had a lot of people I knew that I would call bar friends. They weren't real friends. You wouldn't have them to your house. You wouldn't bring them around your family. But when you walked in the bar you would get a big hello and maybe sit down and have a couple of pops and shoot the shit.
Every once in a while you would get someone who would transition to another status. Usually it involved sports. I mean you might play golf with them in the annual O"Rielly's golf tournament or go to a Yankee game or the fights.
Back in the day I used to hang in this place on Court St called Cousins. It was the only cool bar around. It had live jazz and a lot of girls and good food and the drinks gave a solid pour. When you were friends with Sol the bartender you got a lot of buybacks and shit so it was OK. There was everyone from Mafia guys to Wall St guys to teachers and sanitation men. Plus girls. Did I mention girls?
Any way there was this guy Tony who hung out at the bar. He was like king of the Bar. He knew everybody. He was always there with his wife who was sort of the Den Mother for all the unattached girls who sheltered under her wing. So it paid to be on her good side so to speak. Entertaining her idiot husband was one way to do that. His nickname was Tony Loudmouth.
Tony was a sports guy like me. So we fell into conversation and ended up talking every time I came in the bar. Now Tony was a teacher. Which means you couldn't tell him anything. He knew it all. And would tell you so. But we had some great arguments about sports that most of the bar would join in. Tony was very sure of himself. Even in things he didn't know about. I mean he would lecture Wall St guys who made hundreds of thousand dollars a year on the market. They just laughed. We ended up going to a bunch of ball games together with a couple of other guys from the bar. It was funny though. Almost everyone I introduced him to would end up hating him on short acquaintance. But I found him amusing. I mean I didn't rally care what he had to say. It was no skin off my nose. After all in the end he was just a bar friend. Not a true friend. Not a "Real Yankee" if you will.
Anyhow for a while we had tickets with a Sunday plan. He was part of it for four or five years. But we didn't like the plan because we only would get one playoff or World Series Tickets and it was always in the last row. In 1995 we lost to Seattle and I decided to switch to the every weekend night plan. Which meant you got the same seats for every game of the playoffs and World Series. I wanted to get four tickets so I got three other guys to chip in. But I cut Tony Loudmouth out of the group.
You see after a while it gets to be too much. He caused too many fights with other people. He made it all about him all the time. It just wasn't amusing anymore. So I cut him out like a cancer. Enough is enough. Sometimes you just have to cut people off and not be bothered with their bullshit anymore.
After all when all is said and done.....he is just a bar friend.
30 comments:
4995?
Are you...Trooper from the Future?!?
It may take the Mariners that long to have a winning team.
Of course this story suggests someone is being referred to.
Egypt is our ally.
I think I get the metaphor. We are sympatico about her, but IMHO just let it go. I've lost my head when it involves my kids. I can tell people who have a good heart, That doesn't mean they're not assholes, loudmouths, know-it-alls, etc. I always give them latitude. That said, this is your bar and I respect your decision whatever it is.
Did you know that George's favorite team is the Mets?
Is the bar open? It's nearly 10:30.
Hey Nick I am a lot like you in this respect. I like to bust balls and I always let shit go. Sometimes for twenty years like I did with Tony Loudmouth.
But sometimes people cross a line and I make a turn and that's it for me. I had enough and they become dead to me.
I am there right now. Just sayn'
Trooper, As I said, I respect you and your decision. And I'm sure it would come as no surprise to you I have people who are dead to me also.
You'll appreciate this. I went to the Brewers/Mets game on Friday. There were Met fans in our row. Between innings, for the first time, I get up to take a piss. Another older guy who was a couple seat away also got up. As we crossed in front ot this mamaluke wearing a Strawberry shirt I hear, "Come oin assholes..move" The old guy was in front of me and was shocked since it was between innings. Well, this Met fan wanted to get a good look @ the beginning of the sausage race. I told the guy he was a loser asshole and he talked tough. His 2 buddies kept nudging him to shut up. I asked the asshole if he wanted to follow me out I would be more than happy to "discuss" this. Finally one of his buddies said to the mamaluke, "Look @ the hat!" I had forgotten what hat I was wearing. You see, I have a friend in San Diego who was in the Seals. He gave me a Navy Seals hat that I was wearing that night. He sat down and when I came back from taking my piss he stood right up like a good Met fan. My wife was afraid I was going to throw down. I could have spit in that losers face and he wouldn't have fought.
If you come off as anything less than a total winner a "Real Yankee" will dump you in a minute, maybe even a New York minute. "Real Yankees" are in such total dread that they might not be total winners behind all the bluster that they will run from you screaming into the night at the hint that you're "tainted."
Not true ricpic. Some losers are "Real Yankees." Horace Clark. Jerry Kenny. Fritz Peterson. Ralph Houk. Don Mattingly.
You don't have to win to be a "Real Yankee." You can't be a carpet bagger. You can come from another team and earn your stripes as a real Yankee like Paul O'Neil and David Wells. It is a very subjective thing.
Met fans always back down.
I used to go to bars and have "bar friends".
I would never see them in the light of the day but if we saw each other at a bar we would automatically be best girlfriends and sling our pussies and look for hot hog together. We were about the same cuteness so there was no competition.
I think most all of them wanted to do me when they first met me but knew they weren't getting any taste of my hog hard large cut pice of grade a white meat. They eventually resigned themselves to whoring around with me.
But now I never go out to bars anymore. I am 41 and that is just way too old in fag world.
tits.
these tits are made 4 bouncing
And that's just what they'll do.
These tits are made 4 bouncing.
And they'll bounce all over you.
Are you ready tits?
Do some bouncing!
tits.
I missed the whole she is dead to you thing.
You are entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to voice your opinion. That is the essence of free speech. But when you justify the government squelching free speech by middle of the night police action....well you lose me. Right there.
Right on.
AllieOop said...
Oy, I think we have consensus between Crack and Shiloh, we do live in strange times.
I'm with PB&J, impeach Obama! Now!
Crappy movie guy is a hero to the right! Freedom of his speech is worth the 6 dead bodies, at the embassies and Camp Leatherneck!! Never mind that he may be in on a plot to incite the Islamic nuts? Nah, he's a fucking hero. Right.
9/15/12 10:00 PM
Allie, Allie, Allie, sticks and stones may break your bones (or RPGs and mortars fired by al Qaeda militants), but youtube clips will never hurt thee.
She trills. She shrieks. She clamors. But she never has a clue.
Dressed in U.S. Army uniforms and armed with automatic rifles, rocket propelled grenade launchers and suicide vests, the insurgents attacked coalition fixed and rotary wing aircraft parked on the flight line, aircraft hangars and other buildings.
Six Coalition AV-8B Harrier jets were destroyed and two were significantly damaged.
source
Yep. That's the work of a spontaneous mob of angry goatfuckers all right.
"Read twice, comment once", is advice the woman's clearly never heeded.
Allie is wrong, but with a kid serving I am not going to give her too hard a time (other than to note she is wrong about free speech). She wants things calm and wants her child to come home safe. I want her kid and everyone serving in Afghanistan to come home safely.
The video did not cause what happened in Libya. As for Afghanistan, they are looking for justification after the fact.
She wants things calm and wants her child to come home safe. I want her kid and everyone serving in Afghanistan to come home safely.
But...it seems...she and others are willing to trade our freedoms for the illusion of safety.
That is the problem and where we disagree.
Some say Ben Franklin wrote "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Don't know who wrote it, but whoever did, spoke the truth. Modern education does not include the teaching of what dead white guys said.
This is an excellent illustration of the superiority of an all-volunteer military to a force filled with draftees.
The volunteers are doing a job they agreed to do willingly. We can fret for their safety, of course, but it's part of the package.
Draftees have just been rounded up and shipped out against their will. Their relatives have a right not just to worry, but to be pissed off.
I believe the Vietnam protest movement died the day the draft ended.
I also believe that the Dems who want to reinstate the draft know that it would weaken support for the military. Yes, I'm calling those people treasonous bastards.
Remember during the Persian Gulf War, when some idiot remarked that Bush I was insensitive for sending young people into battle, and asked if he knew what that was like? Right. Um...youngest Navy pilot in WWII, had to bail out of his crippled plane and be plucked from the ocean.
Lefties have no respect for the military, caring or knowing not that it is these heroes who guarantee their right to be stupid, spoiled babies, *especially* since our current armed forces are 100% volunteer. They know the risks when they sign up. Most accept that. The fact that the DNC had a backdrop of Soviet warships and Turkish fighter jets as John Kerry spoke says much about their intelligence, sensitivity, and opinion of our military. The fact that the jug-eared Messiah called an Admiral "General" demonstrates how unfit he is to serve as Cmdr-in-Chief.
This is not Cuba (yet). We don't have fences to keep our people from leaving. Those lefties who piss and moan about how bad we have it, and who long for European Communism, can leave. I'll help them pack and buy a ticket.
Even when we had the draft during Viet Nam, the vast number of troops sent there were enlistees. I went over with an Airborne brigade, which would mean someone had to volunteer twice, out of 182 names on the roster that I have, 11 were draftees. One of them was me.
I recall the day back in 2000 when I announced to some former coworkers that my wife and I were planning to buy a house up in Oceanside. The La Jolla chemistry lab was mainly staffed by foreign students postdocs, but the US students and post docs who were there were mostly the products of elite American universities. One of them looked at me and in all earnestness said: "You know they fly flags up there don't you?"
Now this was all pre-9/11, but it did typify the mentality at elite universities--even among hard science students who people think are apolitical.
The old Boston liberals thought that bussing minorities and mixing up the melting pot would change things in America. They were right in the sense that it works if done voluntarily. I don't know if it was 9/11 or moving to O'Side and living amongst the marines that pulled my further to the right. Whatever it was, I have no regrets.
We couldn't afford to draft men these days. I'm not going to look it up, but service members at the present time make fairly good money.
I have my Wage and Tax Statement from 1967 when I was in the Army.
Federal income tax withheld - $141.48
Wages paid subject to withholding in 1967 - $1622.36
FICA employee tax withheld - $73.22
Total FICA wages paid in 1967 - $1664.73
To reintroduce the draft would mean that wages paid to them would have to go back to a pay scale like we had in 1967 to afford that many people in uniform. Believe me, that ain't gonna happen.
@Allen, minimum wage was $1.00 starting in February of 1967. At 40 hours per week and 52 weeks per year, that works out to $2080. You made 80% of minimum wage. Minimum wage is currently $7.25. 80% of that is $5.80. I doubt many would sign up for that.
I won't insult you by comparing your hours and working conditions to the average American's. You obviously weren't motivated by greed. Thank you.
I got free food, clothes, rifle, ammo, grenades...
Food and clothing are overrated.
Boots, helmet, helicopter rides...
In all honesty, with hindsight on my side, if I could do it all again, I would have joined the military.
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